Microsoft

Microsoft has seemingly hit the purplest of its purple patches this week, after the Redmond-based company announced its Q1 2017 earnings.
Shares ballooned to US$60.43 -- at one point, a jump of nearly 6.3% -- adding around US$25-billion to its market cap. The company's CEO Satya Nadella, was pretty happy to say the least.
"We are helping to lead a profound digital transformation for customers, infusing intelligence across all of our platforms and experiences," he explains.
"We continue to innovate, grow engagement, and build our total addressable market."
Microsoft's Windows 10 is flat, its phone business is dying but its cloud portfolio is...

Microsoft has announced a breakthrough for speech recognition, producing a system that recognises words in a conversation as fast as a human.
The new speech recognition system, by Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research team, makes either the same or fewer errors than transcriptionists, having a word error rate (WER) of 5.9%.
"The 5.9% error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task," Microsoft explained on its blog.
The US tech firm says that the breakthrough marks the first time that a...

The South African arm of Microsoft recently held a Windows 10 Anniversary event to order to highlight the new update. While the software came packed with a range of changes and upgrade, the numbers behind it were far more interesting.
The Anniversary update
According to Anthony Doherty, the Windows and Surface Business Group Lead at Microsoft SA, the Windows Anniversary Update went through 28 pre-builds before its official launch. The Anniversary Update for Windows 10 Mobile had less of those, coming in at 20 pre-releases before its own launch.
During the testing phase, Microsoft received over 5000 feature requests from standard home and in-depth...

The browser wars are hotting up again, largely thanks to Microsoft.
According to a number of user reports, the company is once again issuing tips in its Windows 10 notifications system alerting users to Google Chrome's battery usage.
"Chrome is draining your battery faster. Switch to Microsoft Edge for up to 36 percent more browsing time," it suggests.
Remember when I spoke about the anti-@googlechrome pop up? It's come back, here is a screenshot! #windows10 pic.twitter.com/FpOjL27srK
— Rudy Huyn (@RudyHuyn) July 18, 2016
The latest move follows Microsoft's published YouTube video and extensive article, highlighting the differences in battery life between Chrome, Mozilla Firefox,...

Windows 10 has been out for a while now, but there are still quite a few things to like about the new Microsoft update (although I want my WiFi to work without disconnecting every few hours).
The update brings some convenient keyboard shortcuts too, but which ones are worth remembering? We list some of the more useful combinations.
Activate task view (Windows + Tab)
The task view feature is new in Windows 10, giving you an overview of all your open windows - be it programs, games or file explorer windows.
Launching this is a simple case of hitting Windows and Tab, so you don't need to endlessly Alt+Tab...

Scores of people have been complaining about the questionable ways Microsoft imposes Windows 10 on them. Now, one woman has won a court battle against the Redmond corporation.
According to the Seattle Times, Terri Goldstein's computer tried downloading Windows 10 without her authorisation, but the process failed.
Goldstein, who runs a travel agency with the aid of her computer, found that it would crash and "be unusable for days" at a stretch.
"I had never heard of Windows 10," she said, claiming that no one asked her to upgrade.
Read more: 10 incredibly cool Google Chrome keyboard shortcuts you should know
She initially contacted Microsoft's...

It takes a brave human to market an operating system to its legion of potential users, and when Microsoft set its arbitrary billion devices in three years running Windows 10 goal at the OS's launch, we imagine that the company's marketing team unanimously sighed.
Either that, or they threw in the towel, because Microsoft's latest ploy to get people to upgrade to Windows 10 is just downright dirty.
After the numerous pop-ups, dialogs and alerts in Windows update users have dealt with this past year, the company has played its final card: tapping the X button on its new popup now...

Microsoft's mobile division has endured a torrid time in recent years, seeing lay-offs, mergers and spin-offs. Unfortunately, the company has announced another round of job cuts.
The Redmond company plans to "streamline" its smartphone hardware division, affecting up to 1850 jobs in the process, it announced in a press statement.
"As a result, the company will record an impairment and restructuring charge of approximately $950-million, of which approximately $200-million will relate to severance payments," the company explained.
Read more: Microsoft sells its feature phone unit for $350m, Nokia devices coming
"We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation - with enterprises that value security,...

Sunrise, the calendaring app that was bought by Microsoft in 2015, now has its execution date.
The company took to its blog to say its final goodbyes, suggesting that its staff can't maintain two apps simultaneously (Sunrise, and now Outlook, which most Sunrise employees are now working on).
Microsoft gave the notion that this would happen back in October 2015, but now we finally have a definite date of termination.
"The entire Sunrise team is now working side-by-side with the Outlook team and it’s a thrilling moment for us to work on an app of this scale," the company stated in its...

Microsoft South Africa announced the launch of its Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) programme on Friday. This will allow select partners to directly support, bill, and provision Microsoft Cloud Services for customers.
"What this means for partners, is that they will be able to more easily help their customers take full advantage of cloud services and empower staff to securely collaborate and communicate from almost anywhere, anytime, while using any device," says Derek Kudsee, Partner Sales Lead at Microsoft South Africa.
According to Kudsee, the system has been implemented due to the growing need for cloud solutions in SA.
This move could potentially...

Tech giant Microsoft has released version 1.0 of its browser-based code editor Visual Studio Code (VS Code). This comes after its initial Public Preview in May last year, and the Beta Open Source in November.
The announcement was posted on the Visual Studio website. Since its initial launch last year, over two million developers have installed the software. The VS Code community has also created over 1000 community extensions, such as support for PHP and C++.
The company has worked with its community in order to improve the product with bug fixes and stability improvements. It now also supports nine different languages,...

You've already dealt with auto-replies and robotic phone calls, but Microsoft still thinks that automation has a key role to play in your interactions with businesses or consumers.
Instead of more automatic email replies however, the firm is hedging its bets on smart bots to do the trick.
At its BUILD 2016 developer conference this week, the company showed off chat bots, which allow users to quickly accomplish actions.
It's not the first time that we've seen these though, as the likes of Google Talk, MSN Messenger and other IM platforms dipped their toes into bot waters almost a decade ago.
Even more...

Windows Phone may be on its last legs, but that isn't going to stop Microsoft dropping serious amounts of money on mobile products.
Its latest strategy on this front involves acquiring the company behind intelligent keyboard app SwiftKey. According to TechCrunch, Microsoft is set to drop US250-million on the London-based startup.
As the Redmond-based giant notes in an official blog post, SwiftKey software keyboard and SDK powers more than 300 million Android and iOS devices.
Read more: Microsoft acquires technology assets from Event Zero to enhance Skype for Business Online
The deal, which is all cash and will go through immediately,...

Microsoft on Wednesday announced, that it has acquired technology assets underlying the UC Commander product suite from Event Zero, a company that currently provides management software for Skype for Business Online, for an undisclosed amount. The UC Commander product suite includes management, reporting and analytics technology.
The company adds that the acquisition will allow it to expand and improve the built-in management tools for Skype for Business and shows its commitment to deliver a complete, enterprise-grade communications solution at global scale with Office 365.
Read more: Attempts to regulate WhatsApp, other OTTs could get ludicrous
"Our goal is to make the...

Windows 10 has been installed on over 200 million devices within six months of its launch, Microsoft announced.
When Windows 10 launched on 29 June 2015, within 24 hours it was running on more than 14-million devices and four weeks later, it was on more than 75-million devices.
"Windows 10 adoption is accelerating, with more than 40% of new Windows 10 devices becoming active since Black Friday," notes Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's senior VP.
Read more: Microsoft’s big ad strategy for Windows 10? Babies
The latest Windows version also has the fastest adoption rate. It has beaten Windows 7 by nearly 140% and Windows...